The Public Health Ministry vowed yesterday to intensify its campaign against diseases transmitted by mosquitoes including dengue fever and malaria.
The move came in response to the World Health Organisation's (WHO) World Health Day on Monday, which was based around illnesses transmitted by living organisms — or vector-borne diseases.
Yonas Tegegn, WHO representative for Thailand, yesterday took part in a Public Health Ministry exhibition on the issue at the department's headquarters in Nonthaburi.
According to the WHO, vector-borne diseases account for 17% of all global infectious diseases. The fastest growing such disease is dengue, the incidence of which has increased 30-fold worldwide over the last 50 years.
The Public Health Ministry said Thailand was hit by its worst dengue outbreak for 20 years in 2013, with 153,765 cases and 132 deaths reported, exceeding the 120,000 cases the department had predicted it would have to deal with.
In total, illnesses transmitted by living organisms — including dengue, malaria, encephalitis, chikungunya and elephantiasis — infected 170,051 people and caused 159 deaths last year, the ministry said.
Songyot Chaichana, deputy permanent secretary for public health, said the ministry would order provincial health offices nationwide to teach local people about creating clean environments and trying to get rid of stagnant water pools where mosquitoes lay their eggs.
Provincial health offices will ask people to monitor mosquito breeding habitats on a weekly basis, while encouraging the use of mosquito nets, mosquito repellents and larvicides such as abate sand granules to kill mosquito larvae.
“It is expected that there will be 80,000 to 100,000 cases of dengue this year if we don’t control vectors well, or if people don’t cooperate with us,” said Department of Disease Control (DDC)’s director-general Sopon Mekthon.
According to DDC’s vector-borne disease office, 4,175 cases of dengue and three deaths were reported from January to March this year, a 74% reduction compared with the same period last year.
Five cases of chikungunya were reported in Phuket, Chanthaburi and Chachoengsao during the same period, while a total of 1,557 Thais and 835 foreigners were reported to have contracted malaria.
Neither chikungunya or malaria has killed anyone so far this year.
